Inuyasha ~TAMASHI~

Inuyasha Tamashi, is an game made with rpg maker xp.
It takes place in a alternative timeline, after Naraku is defeated and focusses on the relationship between Kikyo and Inuyasha.
I know that the game is pretty old by now but I just finished it and feel the need to say something about it.
I review the last update of the game that is also avaiable on the official Inuyasha Tamashi google site.
I will also fully review the story and both endings of the game, so there will be spoilers.
If you care about that, or haven't played it yet to the end, I will give a spoiler warning again, when reviewing the story itself.

So we are starting at a beautyfull animated opening screen and are given the choices to start a new game, continue with one of our save files or viewing the gallery.
The first two options don't need any explanation, in the gallery we can see pictures from the story we collected during playing the game.
To be honest, I didn't really figure out how to move to the next page inside the gallery. You had to use the left and right keys, but it didn't really work for me. The pictures were most likely taken from the anime, there also were some original artworks and they were all really beautifull.

When starting a new game we get some scenes and pictures from the anime even with voiceovers and a bit text about what the characters are saying. All in all it looks pretty well made, you could complain about the text looking weird, but on the official page of the game the translator or author recommends to different fonts, that also come with the gamefolder, when downloading from the official google site.
However it is readable even without that and looks pretty good.
The only bad thing I have to say about this, is that you can not skip it. This doesn't seem to be necessairy, but if you play it a second time you may want to skip to the gameplay.

The gameplay is okay.
You can tell that a lot of work went into the maps of the villages and there even are some custom sprites besides the ones ripped from Inuyasha and the divine jewel for nds and Inuyasha a feudal fairy tale for PS1.
The tilsets for the maps are also great and after viewing the sprites and tilesets myself I can not even assume how much research was done for that alone, leave alone all the scripts and pluggins to make everything look that way.

The biggest issue for me, however were the maps as well. It was an endless labyrinth full of random encounters with normal, wild animals before you could reach the next village. Luckilly there are maps on the official website, to guide you through this but they should have been inside the game, maybe viewable in some menu window or something.
Luckilly there were some teleport stones you could activate later and use them with the consumable item 'teleport fu' to fast travel. They were located around the villages but also a bit random and some were a bit far away, so you would still have to walk a little bit to get to your destination.
Also there were a lot of maps before you got there when walking normally and it became way too much of the actuall gameplay, what walking through maps shouldn't be. It makes the game harder but less enjoyable.

The menu had like everything else a pretty neat look. The only problem was that nothing was explained to you. It took me a while to figure out what that shikon was and how it worked. So every rill, starting to count from the middle equals 1 and SPOILER:

There are some minigames, even some where you have to think a little bit. They are mostly fun and if completed with A+ you often get speciall items. So that is really great. They often also used different sprites and gameplay mechanics than the rest of the game but it all worked well together. Also before most of the minigames you were given the opportunity to save.

Speaking of it, you could not save inside of dungeons or villages. However there was a item to save wherever you want.

The combat is pretty okay. For the most part it just looks really nice but even after leveling up many times neither Kikyo or Inuyasha gains a healing skill that works without herbs so you have to buy tons of herbs. I had this problem where I have entered the last boss dungeon, saved the game and ran out of herbs and health...without cheating I would have had to restart the entire game. I have to admit you allways should make multiple saves but it is still a big -, since you couldn't really leave the dungeon.
What I really appreciate about it is that it is very tactic orientated and close to the original Inuyasha show with its skills.Kikyo for example has the skill Kekkei to build a wall around Inuyasha and herself to protect both from attacks for a few rounds, but she can't attack during that time, there are consumable items that have custom attacks, that can't be used otherwise and MP and SP regenerate slowly if you use defense or the normal attack.


So...now we will get to the part that is definently the worst about the game. At least that is what I think. It is the story. So SPOILER WARNING!!!!



So my conclusion is: Wasted potential. Delete a few maps, add a map in the menu for orientation and don't include anything before the time travel and it would have been a great game.